A capably written account by a teacher who hopes to reach today’s troubled, nonconformist youth.
A chatty, engaging memoir of the author's adventurous life as a teenaged boy during the '40s.
At age 13, Isom, an African-American boy growing up in St. Louis, decided he could not abide school any longer. Manipulating his loving but distant mother, his separated alcoholic father and his father's live-in significant other, Isom became a truant. He worked odd jobs, returned to school when caught by the authorities, then, at age 14, just months after the end of World War II, persuaded the adults in his life to vouch for him as he joined the U.S. Navy. Placed in an all African-American unit for boot camp in Bainbridge, MD, Isom labored to fit in despite his unworldliness. He tells of futile attempts to lose his virginity to women picked up in bars; being posted to Boston by the Navy; receiving an assignment on the troop transport ship U.S.S. General A.E. Anderson; sailing to San Francisco, Hawaii and Japan; and looking for love during shore leaves. Choosing to go absent without permission, he and two Navy buddies end up court-martialed and imprisoned by military authorities. The consequences are minimal, as Isom serves his time, then joins the crew of the U.S.S. Shelton, a destroyer. He leaves the military in 1947, a veteran at just 16 years of age. Upon returning to St. Louis, he renews his family ties but sees no reason to remain for the rest of his life. Seemingly restless without end, he hits the road again, finding employment, giving it up, moving on. In 1951, he marries and settles down. It is only in an author's note after the narrative ends that readers learn that he eventually earned a doctorate and became a professional educator in New York.
A capably written account by a teacher who hopes to reach today’s troubled, nonconformist youth.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2005
ISBN: 0-595-33804-6
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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